Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Hair

Author

Released

12/21/2011

In this installment of his popular Masking & Compositing series, Photoshop guru Deke McClelland shows how to select hair—down to the individual strands—and composite portraits against new backgrounds. The course covers how to mask out hair, paint in detail, blend hair, merge channels, and match light sources. Deke also explores special techniques for working with both dark and light hair, as well as extracting hair from complex backgrounds.

Topics include:

Understanding the Calculations command

Calculating masks with the Subtract and Add modes

Enhancing a mask with Apply Image

Creating a traditional blue screen mask

Masking dark hair against a busy background

Painting in missing hairs with a Wacom tablet

Masking blonde hair and flames

Performing selective edits with Dodge and Burn

Masking a difficult image in multiple passes

Skill Level Intermediate

3h 6m

Duration

375,171

Views

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- Hi, I'm Deke McClelland.Welcome to Photoshop Masking and Compositing: Hair,my unflinching guide to isolating that most delicatedetail in all of digital imaging: human hair.To you and I, a strand of hair is an admittedly fine,but ultimately discreet object.To Photoshop, it's the usual series of pixels,and such thin strands of pixels.They come, they go, and they minglewith the surrounding environment.

One hair may be darker than its backgroundand the next one lighter.The transitions may be obvious and abruptor so subtle you can hardly distinguish them.And here's the worst part, hair grows and shrinkswhen set against similar luminance levels,so a dark hair will appear slim against a lightbackground and thicken up as the background darkens,even though the actual hair never changed.It's a photographic illusion that createsspecial challenges when masking.The upshot is that hair doesn't respond wellto Photoshop's automated tools, which is whyI'll be showing you a handful of advanced manualapproaches, all of which produce excellent results.

I'll start by introducing you to the commandsthat do the best job of seeing hair,calculations and apply image.Then I'll show you two unique blend modes,add and subtract, and their supporting optionsscale and offset.From then on, we'll examine hair in a seriesof four projects.First, we'll isolate hair set againsta blue screen or sky.Then we'll work on dark hair, even going so faras to paint in missing strands with a Wacom tablet.

In chapter three, we'll select blonde hair,and just for fun, we'll mask a translucent flame.And finally, we'll take on the tough stuff.Hair of all luminance levels set againstan almost identically colored and very busy background.Over the next three hours, we'll start simpleand then get very very complex.Here's how to mask and composite hair in Photoshop.